CANAAN - Episode 7

Come the end of the last episode of CANAAN, it seemed as though Alphard (who I suppose we should probably refer to as "the artist formerly known as Canaan") and the Snakes organisation looked to hold all of the cards, having taken over the International Security conference, kidnapped Maria and deployed the Ua virus right under the US President's nose.

The only peaceful outcome to this state of affairs is, in the US administration's eyes, to make use of Kenji Oosawa (the father of Maria, of course) as the man with an antidote to the Ua virus, but even this avenue appears to be exhausted as they see his car explode in a deadly fireball. In true American style, this only leaves one course of action - To blow up the entire conference centre to make everything "okay" again.


Meanwhile, Canaan herself is racing to save Maria, which to be honest is something we don't get to see as much of as I would have liked. After a wonderful scene which was more than a little reminiscent of The Matrix's infamous lobby sequence on fast forward, we see very little of her until the end, as she is left struggling to make sure the bomb about to be dropped on all and sundry lands off-course. Instead, the focus of the episode is far more on the political side of things, while also dropping some hints about the role of both Maria and her father in the grand scheme of things. It also sees a decidedly disgruntled Linag Qi walking away from her comrades and sister, which looks like it may well leave us with another faction to deal with for the remainder of the series (as if things weren't confusing enough).

For an episode that had the potential to be absolutely action-packed from beginning to end, I was actually more than a little surprised at the angle that was instead taken of focusing almost solely on the bigger picture; the macro of Alphard's plan and intentions over the micro of the Canaan-Maria dynamic - Perhaps I'm just too action-starved at the moment but I was hoping for a little more given the top-notch quality of this show's offerings in previous episodes. That said, a far amount was done to progress that bigger picture, although it all feels somehow jumbled slightly for reasons I can't quite put my finger on - I suppose I'm simply worried that the series is biting off more than it can possibly chew, especially now we're basically at the half-way mark of CANAAN and it still seems to be trying to set everything up.